A film by Toshio Matsumoto
Wednesday 29 October 2025
7pm

The Song of Stone (1963), 25min

The Song of Stone (Ishi no Uta) is an experimental documentary film by avant-garde film director Toshio Matsumoto (1932–2017) with a soundtrack by Kuniharu Akiyama. The film follows the lives of stonemasons in the village of Aji on Shikoku in Japan and their intimate but tough relationship with the material they work with – a material that follows them from the cradle to the grave. Using almost exclusively still images, Kuniharu Akiyama’s soundscape and Toshio Matsumoto’s voice-over convey a quiet and highly poetic portrait of a granite quarry and the labour involved, but also the stonemasons’ spiritual and caring relationship with the living material that is stone.

The Song of Stone is screened in conjunction to our current exhibition niilas helander: If I am the lake you take your face from.